Keyword Research That Doesn't Suck

Here's how most keyword research goes: you open Ahrefs, you type in a competitor, you export 10,000 keywords into a spreadsheet, you feel tremendously productive for about fifteen minutes, and then you never look at that spreadsheet again because it's just an overwhelming wall of data that tells you nothing actionable, which, if it sounds familiar, is because it's procrastination disguised as work.

The problem isn't the tools, which are perfectly capable of doing what they're designed to do, but rather the process itself, because you're starting with noise and hoping to somehow find signal buried in there somewhere, which is completely backwards and explains why you end up with nothing usable despite spending hours on "research."

Good keyword research is a funnel where you start narrow with what you actually know, expand deliberately and with purpose, then filter ruthlessly back down until you end with a list you can actually execute on, a list that tells you exactly what to create and in what order.

Step 1: Seed Keywords From Your Brain

Close the tools, all of them, and open a blank document instead, because the first step isn't data collection but rather introspection: write down five to ten terms that describe what you do, not what you think people search for but what you actually do, the words you'd use to explain your business to a stranger at a bar who asked what you're working on.

If you sell project management software, your seeds might be "project management," "task tracking," "team collaboration," "work management," and "project planning"; if you're a personal injury lawyer, they might be "car accident lawyer," "slip and fall attorney," "injury claim," and "accident settlement."

These are your seeds, and they come from domain knowledge rather than data, from tacit knowledge that you've accumulated over years of working in your field, which matters here because you know your market better than any tool ever will.

Step 2: Expand Deliberately

Now you use tools, but with purpose and restraint rather than the usual "export everything and sort it out later" approach: Google Autocomplete is your first stop, where you type each seed keyword and write down the suggestions because these are real searches from real people and Google is literally telling you what people want to know; People Also Ask boxes come next, where you search your seeds and expand every PAA box because these questions are content gold where each one could be a subheading or an entire article; Ahrefs or Semrush let you plug in your seeds and look at "matching terms" and "related terms," but resist the urge to export everything and instead skim for patterns while adding promising terms to your list manually; and competitor analysis shows you what your competitors are ranking for that you aren't, where you use the content gap tool but again don't export blindly and instead look for themes and patterns.

By the end of this step, you should have 200 to 500 keywords, which sounds like a lot but is still manageable, still human-readable, still a list you can actually look at and think about rather than a data dump you'll never touch again.

Step 3: Filter Ruthlessly

This is where most people fail, not because the filtering is technically difficult but because they can't bring themselves to delete keywords that they spent time collecting, as if the act of finding a keyword creates an obligation to keep it.

Delete aggressively if the keyword is irrelevant to your business, meaning you can't sell something to the person searching for it; if it has wrong intent, being informational when you need transactional or vice versa (and check the SERP if you're unsure); if it's unwinnable because you can't realistically rank for it no matter how good your content is; if it has duplicate intent, like "best project management software" and "top project management tools" which are really the same keyword and you should just pick one; or if it's too broad, because single-word keywords are usually vanity metrics and "software" tells you nothing useful about what the person actually wants.

Be aggressive about this because the goal isn't a big list that makes you feel like you did thorough research, the goal is a usable list that actually guides your content creation, and I'd rather have 50 keywords I can actually target than 5,000 that sit in a spreadsheet making me feel overwhelmed every time I open it.

Step 4: Prioritize by Opportunity

Now rank what's left, but not by search volume, which is the obvious but wrong way to do it, but rather by opportunity, which you can think of roughly as volume times realistic CTR divided by effort.

High volume means nothing if you can't rank for it, which is why a keyword with 10,000 monthly searches where you'd realistically end up on page 5 is worth less than a keyword with 500 searches where you'd be in the top 3, because 500 searches with a 30% click-through rate beats 10,000 searches with a 0% click-through rate every time.

When evaluating opportunity, consider your current position, because if you're already ranking 11-20 then that's striking distance and should be prioritized; your topical authority, because if you have related content already then it's easier to rank when you're building on demonstrated strength; whether content already exists, because refreshing existing content is a faster win than creating from scratch (see the content refresh formula); and business value, because what a conversion is actually worth to you might justify spending more effort on high-intent commercial keywords even if the volume is lower.

After this exercise, your top 20 keywords should be obvious, practically jumping off the list at you, and those are your priority while everything else goes into a backlog that you may or may not ever get to.

What You End Up With

What you end up with is a prioritized list of 15 to 25 keywords where each one has passed the tests that matter: relevant to your business, correct intent for your goals, realistically winnable given your current authority and resources, and worth the effort to pursue given the potential return.

This is your content roadmap, not a data dump that overwhelms you every time you look at it, but an actual plan that tells you what to create next and why.

The Ongoing Process

Keyword research isn't a one-time project that you do once and forget about, but rather a recurring process that evolves as your site grows and the market shifts: monthly, you should check Search Console for new queries driving impressions because these are keywords Google already associates with you and represent low-hanging fruit; quarterly, you should re-run competitor gaps because markets shift and new opportunities emerge that weren't there before; and after every piece of content you publish, you should note what worked because some keyword patterns consistently perform better for your particular site, and you need to feed that signal back into future research.